Bella Fontaine is on her own. Fresh out of college and with the winnings from her first international photography competition, she decides to leave Los Angeles to forge a new life in New York City. Will she be able to overcome the trauma of her childhood and her break from home to make it as a successful artist and professional photographer in a new city? Or will her secrets catch up with her, and keep her from developing the relationships she needs to make her dreams come true?

We meet Bella at two turning points in her life—as a young adult, making her way in New York, and as a child just after her tenth birthday, when she is already a prodigious gardener at the elbows of her two grandmothers. Olivette and Miriam are two master gardeners, each with beautiful, mature gardens as different from each other as the two women who tend them.  As Bella’s homelife begins to unravel, her world with her grandmothers is a refuge of stability and belonging. But when Miriam moves in with Olivette in search of healing, the grandmothers bond in a way that makes their granddaughter feel excluded. What happens next sends Bella out into the world before she is ready.
         

The Grandest Garden is a poignant coming-of-age story about the ties that bind us to our people— and how to survive when they break.